Authentication and Authorization Using JWT on Spring Webflux

Ardiansyah
3 min readJul 22, 2018

Security of the application is very important, especially for your HTTP API. JWT is one of the ways for securing (i.e. authentication and authorization) your HTTP API.

JSON Web Token (JWT) is a JSON-based open standard (RFC 7519) for creating access tokens that assert some number of claims. [source]

This time, I want to share my experience on how to secure your HTTP API in Spring Webflux using JWT, at least as far as I learned until today, for Spring WebMVC you can see my repo here.

1. Setup Project

Make sure to add some dependencies to your project. I used 2.5.0.RELEASE for the parent.

  • spring-boot-starter-security
  • spring-boot-starter-webflux
  • jjwt (from io.jsonwebtoken)
  • lombok

if you use maven, see code below…

pom.xml

2. Model

First, create an enum that contains the role that will be used.

If you use hasRole at @PreAuthorize (at section 7. HTTP API in this article), by default you have to add ROLE_ prefix, see this Spring Doc for more info.

Role.java

Next, create User POJO that implementing UserDetails

User.java

AuthRequest and AuthResponse for login endpoint

AuthRequest.java
AuthResponse.java

and Message for example on resource.

3. Password Encoder

Next, create your custom password encoder (for user’s password simulation), don’t forget to add some properties for your secret salt on application.properties.

springbootwebfluxjjwt.password.encoder.secret=mysecret
springbootwebfluxjjwt.password.encoder.iteration=33
springbootwebfluxjjwt.password.encoder.keylength=256
PBKDF2Encoder.java

4. User Service

Next, create UserService , this is just an example, you can load the user from the database (from repository).

UserService.java

5. JWT Util

Next, create JWTUtil, don’t forget to add some properties for your JWT secret salt and JWT expiration time on application.properties

springbootwebfluxjjwt.jjwt.secret=ThisIsSecretForJWTHS512SignatureAlgorithmThatMUSTHave64ByteLength
springbootwebfluxjjwt.jjwt.expiration=28800
JWTUtil.java

6. Security Configuration

Create AuthenticationManager that implementing ReactiveAuthenticationManager for validate token and role.

AuthenticationManager.java

Next, create SecurityContextRepository that implementing ServerSecurityContextRepository for get the token and forward to AuthenticationManager.

SecurityContextRepository.java

Next, create WebSecurityConfig and add EnableWebFluxSecurity and EnableReactiveMethodSecurty annotation, in this component you can configure all your security needs, like authentication manager, security context repository, which url is in permit (in this case /login), etc.

WebSecurtyConfig.java

and an optional class for CORS.

CORSFilter.java

7. http API

Next, create endpoint for login (create token). You can change the url to /auth or whatever you want.

AuthenticationREST.java

and example secured endpoint.

ResourceREST.java

Done 👍, next you can test your http API (e.g. using Postman).

Access secured API without token
Login and get Token
Access secured API with token (Key: Authorization, Value: Bearer token)
Access secured API with token, but not allowed roles

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